Your Humble Scribe

Monday, July 31, 2006

Qana comments

Chris (in Southeast TX) said... "Just how many Katyusha rockets were at the International Airport?"Kind of depends on how many Syrian and Iranian cargo aircraft were there. Katyushas don't grow on trees. The rate Hezbollah is using them, they've got to be re-supplied. Resupply isn't going to be using the port (Israeli blockade), or the highway (blocked by Israeli bomb craters), so that kind of leaves the airport.Plus, why give Hezbollah High Command an escape route? "You can't tell me they can't hit the launcher without taking out a city block."

Hezbollah uses Iranian Fajr-3 rockets. The warhead is ninety-two pounds of high-explosive packed in ball-bearings, on top of a nitro-cellulose propellant, twelve rockets to a truck, not counting reloads.I don't care what you hit those Katys with, you're going to detonate all twelve warheads. And probably all twelve nitro-cellulose solid fuel charges, along with the fuel in the truck and any reloads. That is going to do quite nicely for the city block, whether you used half of an M112 demo block, or a 500-pound GBU.

"Just how many launchers were in the UN compound?"

According to an earlier e-mail from one of the UN soldiers inside the compound, it was crawling in Hezbollah terrorists. If I were a UN muckety-muck, it would behoove me to tell Hezbollah to quit using UN neutrality to hide."This is equivalent to your 16 yo son repeatedly shooting my windows out with a slingshot, so one day me and 30 of my friends open fire with heavy machine guns on your house and kill most people inside it."No, this would be the equivalent of my sixteen year-old son repeatedly shooting your windows out with a slingshot, before, during and after sneaking into your yard in the middle of the night, killing your dog, and forcibly kidnapping your 9-year-old daughter at knifepoint.

Or have we forgotten the incursion, murder and kidnapping by Hezbollah of Israeli soldiers in defiance of a ceasefire?Anonymous said...

"How about if a bunch of Anti-Mexican KKK members started sniping Mexicans across Rio Grande...."

What you ignore in your fairy tale, is that if -- and that's a big 'IF' -- American citizens launched an attack on Mexico, America would investigate. American peace officers would set a world record for Doors Kicked In, and after gathering intel, American SWAT teams would rescue the hostages, and America would apologize -- profusely. America would pay reparations through the bloody snout -- over and above the line of generosity. America would spend the equivalent of several nations annual GDP to find the perps, have a public trial, and if found guilty, America would publicly and happily execute the criminals. America would then pass even more laws against it's citizens just to make the citizens of Mexico feel better.

Mexico wouldn't find it necessary to "level El Paso and Austin and Houston" because America would metaphorically do the job for them, and we'd be apologizing to Mexico every step of the way.

What part of this did Lebanon do? Oh, that's right, they said, "Sorry, we can't control them. Too bad."

How many investigations did Lebanon conduct? How many arrests did Lebanon make? When did Lebanon rescue the Israeli hostages? How many trials are we going to get to watch on Court TV? Executions?

You called this dance: America would bust its own balls to find, try, and execute those responsible for an attack on Mexico, and you know it. So. Finish your hypothesis: Speak unto me of the Lebanese legal plans regarding this attack by Lebanese citizens upon a neighbor, do.

A while back you quoted Nitchke (sp?) "Those who fight monsters must take great care so they don't become monsters themselves. If you stare into the Abyss long enough, the Abyss stares back at you" (or something like that) Are you sure Isreal has not forgotten that? To me it seems, there are two monsters out there.....

Really? You can look at Israel, who is managing not to bomb relief convoys given proper notice...

Versus Hezbollah, who then starting using relief convoys to ship militants and war materiel ...

And you see two monsters.

Israel, who announced a 48 hour ceasefire in aerial bombardment, and tried to follow through ...

Until Hezbollah took advantage of the 48 hour ceasefire to shell Israeli tanks ...

And you see two monsters.

Israel, who is attempting to limit civilian casualties by dropping advance warning leaflets in Arabic to Lebanese civilians ...

And Hezbollah, who is attemtping to maximize civilian casualties by dropping Katyusha anti-personnel rockets on Israeli civilians ...

And you see two monsters.

The Israelis may be sneaking up to take a look into the Abyss, but Hezbollah got there first, took a long look, liked what they saw, and took up residence.

14 comments:

Anonymous
said...

First, some of the respondents who replied before know nothing about counter battery fire.

Artillery and rocket units, like the ones in Hezbollahs amploy, use the "shoot and scoot" methd of firing and then running. To counter this, you hit an area near the launcher as quickly as possible. Surgical strikes are not possible.

In order for US citizens to understand Israel's issues, we have to be in their place. Imagine if Canada and Mexico decided that the US no longer had the right to exist, and the two countries announced that they would not rest until all US citizens were dead.

Then, in the period of 40 years, they invaded the US a total of 4 times, killing millions of Americans each time, and then had members of their military sneak into the country disguised as civilians and begin bombing restaurants, schools, theaters and shopping malls.

Then, Mexico begins shooting 100-200 rockets a day into Houston, after kidnapping several Army troops. When you try to counter attack, you discover that the troops firing the rockets are hiding in civilian neighborhoods and dressing like civilians.

What would WE do? Hold our fire and let the slaughter of OUR citizens continue?

Interesting how so many people no longer have the ability to think critically. No wonder most expect the government to take care of them from cradle to grave. They have the mental acuity of a lethargic eight year old with no concept of true independence. "Oh, won't someone please hold my hand and help me to do the heavy thinking?"

I'd feel bad for them if I wasn't so disgusted by their willingness to put their piss-ignorance on display for all the world to see. They might as well announce they don't have the ability to fire up the neocortex and suss out the situation on their own but are more than willing to fall back on their mammalian brain and howl about it like an overemotional monkey.

If I were the Israeli planner in charge, I'd be saying to the world "The innocent civilians living between the Litani River and the Israeli border, plus those in the Bekaa Valley, have one week to vacate the area completely. After that, the entire area will be turned into a level parking lot. There will be no structures, no trees, no roads, no infrastructure, and no survivors. Then let Hez'b'Allah try something in the wasteland!"

I am with Peter. I believe my patience would be long gone. Frankly I really don't care about what other people think about me anymore (because I know so many that are just plain stupid or I do not value their opinion) so I would have lobbed a lot more ordinance into Lebanon. How true the old saying "if you lay down with dogs don't be surprised if you get some fleas" or whatever.

It's good to see someone giving a reasoned analysis of the situation; too many people just see the part about children and start flying off the handle without really thinking it through. Of course, those sort of people, in my experience, are usually the type who babble away at things they know nothing about. Good post, LawDog.

Bernard probably wasn't even born yet in 1968. But the problem is, 6 days might be enough to destroy three small air forces and smash three small conventionally-organized armies until they needed re-equipment and a long period of reorganization before they could fight again, but it takes much longer than that to properly secure an area. Even when the defeated troops you have to round up and process into a POW camp are in uniform, it will take longer than six days to find all of them over 50 miles of territory. When they are wearing civilian clothing, deliberately hiding among the civilian population, and trying to persuade the civilians to volunteer as suicide bombers, it's going to take quite a while. (Although, IMO, the Israelis can dispense with the part where you ship the ones you catch off to a camp; they're unlawful combatants and members of an organization that fights mainly by means of war crimes, so shoot them on the spot.)

To start from back to front, when I made the comment about "room temperature IQ-if the room is located somewhere on Venus", I was endeavoring to make a compliment: the last time I checked, the planet Venus had a surface temperature of 380 degrees centigrade. I leave the question as to whether I was disparaging or praising anonymous as an exercise for the reader.

As regards why I was praising anonymous (at least the one making the several comments here), it was because I substantially agreed with his analysis, particularly the part about giving Israel six days in which to take care of matters (and no, MarkM, I was born in 1953, and started following the news seriously in 1962 [around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by the way], and so I am reasonably familiar with the events of the Six Day War).

Finally, if you will bother to read what I said, you may see that I was addressing my comments in my earlier entry to the parties to the Chris and "anonymous" who were making such boneheaded comments in the main entry, and which the 'Dog was so ably refuting.

I hope that that clears things up adequately. We now return to our regularly scheduled LawDogpile.

I abhor internet arguements, i avoid em by ignoring most of those poor uninformed folks with whom I do not agree.. until and unless they actually sway my opinion with their (generally pointless) perspective and insight.

But to have a 'moral' distaste for war is just pastel peurile puke.

War is hell. Even for atheists..

You either abhor war, with every bone in you, with every drop of blood, with every brain cell and moral compunction and ethic you own, or you're amoral and bankrupt of humanity.

Which doesn't ignore necessity. First you do what you must, then you do as you wish.

Politics is the art of the possible.. war is the art of the necessary.